First off, the good news -- the Punic War sets are here, the preorders have shipped and everyone I've spoken with so far says they are beautiful. (And they are.)

We had one major problem and one minor problem. The minor problem is that customs decided to do a detailed inspection of the container the shipment was in, which delayed everything for at least a week more than it normally would.

The major problem is that our printer put the wrong booklets in each box. The basic set is supposed to have the comprehensive rules (so it's playable out of the box) while the expansion set has the scenario book with design notes. In production the booklets were reversed. What makes this mistake particularly annoying is that in the end I can't even blame the printer -- it's 99% my fault. The mistake was caused by vague instructions (where I thought I'd been specific) and was present in the proof sample and I just dropped the ball on it.

Sooooo...the day after the shipment came in we had a pizza party at my house. Rob and Darwin came over, as did Niko, his excellent girlfriend and a guy named Aaron who is one of the owners of a game store out in California and who recently moved to the area. We opened, swapped and repackaged close to 2,000 sets which were picked up two days later by a company that will be re-doing the shrink wrap so we can send them to distributors. I'm hoping to get some cases back today so I can get the product into retail stores ASAP.

With preorders we didn't bother doing this, of course. We just sent them out, since it's only a problem if someone buys just the basic set.

With preorders we didn't bother doing this, of course. We just sent them out, since it's only a problem if someone buys just the basic set.

Good thing, too, since a lot of your pre-order customers were practically foaming at the mouth with anticipation!

Great job on the set overall. The production quality on the packaging and the rulebook is a BIG step up.

What would be the chances of you guys selling Battleground army-themed boxes for all of the armies we have already bought? You could sell the boxes with big rulebooks in them for, say, $5-8 apiece and I would gladly buy one for each of my armies!

To be honest, I doubt that our scale is big enough to make something like that work.

We're above the scale needed to make printing things sensible, but not by a lot -- certainly not by a factor of 2. That means that even if 25% of our players would buy something, it's probably just not sensible to do it.

If there were enough interest we could look at making high-quality stickers that could surround a standard box of some type so players could make their own.

Actually, if you made pdf that we could print out and cut and paste that would be best of all (i.e. most realistically likely to happen). I would like to see one that would hold a basic plus reinforcement deck plus command cards. Not the double wide in PW, but big enough to house the decks all piled together in one pile.

How about a generic non-army-themed Battleground heavy-duty deck box? Use the Punic Wars size, have a label on the side so I can write in the army and have a copy of the full-size rulebook and new reference cards in it. I would buy one for each of my armies for sure, and many people would be with me, I would think.

The PDFs for the stickers would just need to be the size of a playing card (2.5" X 3.5"). If somebody has the ability to do up a cardstock outline of a double thick deck box, that would be cool. Otherwise I'll probably go all cro-magnon on it and just deconstruct one and trace it on some card stock with double width sides.

The Ultra Deck (sorry for the advertisement) deck boxes, the plastic ones that can hold sleeved cards, seem to be ok. I use them for all the armies and i would like to get some stickers for them.

I second this, they're what i use as well. I've found every faction, other than the High Elves, to fit with penny sleeves, one complete faction per box. This includes the new Punic Wars armies, which don't fit in their original boxes with sleeves. I'm good with the color-coding the Ultra boxes offer me, but if i run out of colors, then some sort of graphic might be cool. As for what became of my PW boxes, one now holds the 2.4 rules and the scenario booklet, while the other contains the extra high elves, my promo cards, and my leftover penny sleeves.

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At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas. -Aldous Huxley